Here’s some encouraging news for the European startup scene, and London in particular. TransferWise, the online currency exchange that uses the crowd to undercut traditional money transfer services, has announced that it’s closed a $6 million series A round led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures — the first investment in Europe by the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor’s international… → Read More
As you may know, TechCrunch, GigaOm and VentureBeat host the Crunchies award ceremony each year to celebrate the most compelling startups, Internet and technology innovations of the year. But we also recognize the angel investors and venture capitalists who write the checks that fund these innovations.
For Angel of the Year, which was presented by Google Ventures Partner Kevin Rose and… → Read More
PayPal co-founder, early Facebook investor and Founders Fund partner Peter Thiel today took the stage at the DLD conference in Munich for a very wide-ranging discussion about the future of philanthropy, education, how we can sustain growth in the developed world and why Facebook won out over MySpace. → Read More
PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, along with existing investors, has invested $49 million in Xero, the online accounting software for small businesses. It is Thiel’s third investment in Xero. Earlier this year, Thiel and existing investors put $16.6 million into the company. Thiel invested $3 million in New Zealand-founded Xero in 2010. → Read More
Serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel has opened up applications for his ’20 Under 20′ Thiel Fellows for 2013 intake. The program awards 20 budding entrepreneurs $100,000 grants each to work on developing innovative technology ideas. Those selected for grants are also mentored by experienced professionals from the Thiel Network. → Read More
PayPal co-founder and famed investor Peter Thiel has sold the majority of his shares in Facebook, according to an SEC filing. Thiel has sold 20.6 million Class A shares, leaving him with only 5.6 million shares, all of which are Class A.
A significant portion of the filing seems to be on behalf of the Founders Fund, in which Thiel is a partner. Other entities named in the filing include Lembas… → Read More
It wasn’t so long ago that Peter Thiel began publicly pushing the somewhat controversial idea that higher education is in a bubble, or launching an initiative to help smart young people “stop out of school.”
For these reasons, Thiel’s decision to teach a higher ed course was unexpected, even controversial. Last month, he began teaching a class at Stanford called “Computer Science 183… → Read More
OK, now I’m worried. Here’s why:
Lo these many years ago, in the long-gone spring of 1996, I set out to San Francisco to make my software fortune, armed with a freshly minted degree from Canada’s finest technical university. The second of the interviews I’d arranged via email–itself a radical notion, then–consisted mostly of playing Doom with my potential employers, but during the little time… → Read More
It’s no secret that Peter Thiel thinks that the next big bubble facing our economy is not inflating the housing or tech markets, but that of higher education. The former PayPal CEO and early backer of Facebook is well-known for his contrarian views and has more than once publicly criticized higher education for being an overhyped and bloated industry. The entrepreneur-turned-investor has been on a… → Read More
Early on Day One of Disrupt SF, Silicon Valley legends Peter Thiel and Max Levchin came out on stage with a grim message of doom: “Innovation in the world today is somewhere between dire straits and dead … outside of computers and the Internet, we’ve had forty years of stagnation.” Meanwhile, Startup Alley boasted a large number of trivial, me-too apps, all too often marketed as “Airbnb for X”… → Read More
Peter Thiel and Max Levchin are busy guys. Thiel, aside from being on the Board of Directors for companies like Palantir Technologies, Geni, and Asana, an early investor and former board member at Facebook, and also happens to be founder and president of hedge fund Clarium Capital as well as Managing Partner of his VC firm, Founder’s Fund. Levchin was founder and CEO of Slide (which was acquired… → Read More
A new startup called Booktrack launched this morning (actually, the NYT launched it yesterday), in an effort to create a whole new genre of e-books.
Booktrack creates synchronized soundtracks for e-books that aim to “dramatically boost the reader’s imagination and engagement”.
The startup’s technology combines music and sound effects with text, automatically paced to one’s reading speed. → Read More
A few weeks ago I was meeting with Peter Thiel and that pesky question of whether we’re in a bubble or not came up. In a debate both sides are getting bored with, Thiel made a point I hadn’t heard: That LinkedIn’s IPO wasn’t some Netscape moment that opened the markets up for everyone else. In fact, he argued, it was the opposite.
LinkedIn showed that you can have a compelling IPO and get an… → Read More
Well-known tech executive turned high-profile investor Peter Thiel, former PayPal CEO and an early backer of Facebook, this morning announced the appointment of the first 24 Thiel Fellows.
These are remarkable young entrepreneurs and creative minds that, as inaugural members of the 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship, will pursue “innovative scientific and technical projects, learn entrepreneurship, and… → Read More
My friends, my followers on Twitter, and people who’ve read my previous posts know that I have a very strong opinion about education: that it is absolutely necessary in order for you to build a foundation for success. Despite having appointments at five elite universities, I am not a proponent of elite education. Rather, my research led me to conclude that ivy-leaguers may be able to get their… → Read More
Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you.
I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious.
Some people are contrarian for the sake of getting headlines or outsmarting the markets. For Thiel… → Read More
As far as I know, and my Web searching skills can take me, early Facebook investor Peter Thiel hasn’t yet publicly commented on the role of Eduardo Saverin, who co-founded and initially bankrolled ‘thefacebook’ back in the early days.
Well, Thiel did exactly that, on Big Think (video below). Asked who Saverin is, Thiel says he was “affiliated, quasi-employed at Facebook in 2004″. The fun doesn’t… → Read More
PayPal founder and early Facebook investor and board member Peter Thiel has invested NZ$4 million (that’s about $3 million USD) in online accounting software company Xero to support its expansion into the US market.
Thiel, who manages a hedge fund called Clarium Capital, will also join Xero’s US Advisory Board. → Read More
I wrote a post Sunday about the difference between cultural waves in Silicon Valley and the individual companies that come out of them. Many of the individual companies survive but the wave itself always has to crash. That’s the nature of waves. But it’s also the nature of waves that another one always comes along. I have no idea what that will be. After all, the smartest people in the Valley… → Read More
“The Yelp for cellphones will be Yelp. The Google for cellphones will be Google.”
That was Clarium Capital President Peter Thiel talking to our own Sarah Lacy on stage during TechCrunch Disrupt today. His point was that Internet innovation today is much like innovation in the automobile industry in the 1950s and 1960s. That is, there isn’t much — it’s all about the big boys, in Thiel’s… → Read More
Today at our TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Clarium Capital President Peter Thiel sat down with our own Sarah Lacy to talk about a whole range of issues. But at the end of the dicussion, he disclosed a bit of news.
Thiel is starting a new initiative that will offer grants of up to $100,000 for kids to drop out of school. Yes, you read that right. Though that’s not how Thiel puts… → Read More
Peter Thiel made a really wise bet on Facebook as the social network’s first angel investor back in 2003. Of course, now Thiel’s foresight has paid off—the company is not only the biggest social network in the world but it is valued in the tens of billions. In fact, Thiel, who was being interviewed by Sarah Lacy, said today at TechCrunch Disrupt that Facebook’s $30 billion valuation is still… → Read More
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is starting a new startup called Asana to solve enterprise collaboration, and he just closed a $9 million series A round from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz. this follows $1.2 million angel round last spring from investors including Ron Conway, Peter Thiel, Mitch Kapor, MySpace CEO Owen van Natta, Sean Parker, and former Facebook Director of Mobile… → Read More
Nearly every investor is hurting right now—even PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who manages the $5.2 billion Clarium Capital Management hedge fund. The fund has had a good record over the years, with a 27 percent annual return since it started in 2000. And up until June, Thiel managed to produce a 58 percent return for the year. But in the second half of the year, his bets turned sour, and in… → Read More
In a long-ranging discussion today at TechCrunch50, investor Peter Thiel (PayPal, Facebook, Slide) gave his thoughts on what is the best predictor of startup success. At the Founder’s Fund, one of the most important factors he likes to look at before deciding to invest in a startup is how much the CEO is paying himself. (This is also a factor that one of his investments, YouNoodle, looks at to … → Read More
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